The crew of developers over at the Montreal-based Pheromone Lab was recently greeted with a daunting task. After creating a stop-motion animationiPad app for a client, naturally, the client wanted to make sure there were no problems after the nth use. The client asked the Pheromone team to test it by manually taking between 10,000 and 15,000 photos. As Pheromone’s Jon Masse says on the company’s blog, “who really wants to sit and manually take 10,000 photos?”

The group decided to build something that they could simply turn on and leave alone to snap the thousands of photos while they continued working on other important tasks. Yes, they needed to find their “drinking bird” — something other than an intern that would monotonously and repeatedly press a button for them. The team turned to Lego bricks for the answer.

Using a Lego Mindstorm kit, a cardboard box, and a few borrowed capacitive styluses, a Lego robot hand was created. The robot sits on Masse’s desk and simply pushes the stationary iPad’s photo button with a stylus that more or less conducts electricity in a similar way as that of a human finger. The stylus is pushed by tiny Lego gears, which then hits the app’s photo button and clicks the photo.

Time is money, and if one of the developers at Pheromone was forced to spend hours upon hours pushing a button, it wouldn’t exactly be very cost effective. Clearly, these guys know how to think outside of the box. Not only did the crew at Pheromone solve a problem for their client, but the video below will surely get other companies calling up the developer for its innovative ideas.